1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to monitoring a user's interaction with an ad and storing information in a web browser's cookie during a web-browsing session.
2. Description of the Related Art
Online advertising has grown significantly in recent years. Web pages often include space for informational content desired by the web page's visitors (referred to as users, who use the information presented on the web page), as well as space for advertising (ad) content. The advertising space on a web page is generally referred to as ad inventory. The publisher of the web page offers its ad inventory for sale, directly or indirectly, to advertisers. Advertisers purchase advertising space to place individual instances of ad content, generally referred to as impressions. Impressions are presented to the user with the hope of inducing the user to perform some desired act including, for example, clicking on an impression, visiting a specific web page, signing up for online services or news from a particular web page, or purchasing merchandise from yet another web page.
The online advertising industry includes many different types of advertisers that represent companies producing a wide variety of goods and services. As the internet has grown rapidly in recent years, concordantly the supply for ad inventory has also dramatically increased. However, given the wide variety of goods and services to be advertised, not all web pages have ad inventory that is valuable to a given advertiser. Thus, advertisers, often in partnership with third parties such as ad servers, try to identify ad inventory that is valuable to their customers. Ad servers help advertisers target particular web pages and audiences of users, instead of indiscriminately placing ads in front of a large number of users. To do this ad servers collect statistics regarding user traffic on web pages to make better advertising inventory purchase decisions. These statistics include web pages visited by users and the actions taken by those users on the visited web pages. The goal of such targeted advertising is to increase the likelihood that the users the advertiser advertises to actually convert.
To assist in advertising targeting, web pages may include embedded pixel tags that collect statistics regarding user visits. Typically, a pixel tag is a code snippet placed in the web page that is delivered to the user's web browser. The code snippet may, for example be written in HTML, XML, JavaScript™, or any other programming language. When the browser processes the web page, the code snippet is executed (referred to herein as “firing the pixel tag”) causing the browser to transmit a message to a server identified in the code snippet. The message may include information regarding the internet protocol (IP) address of the computing device that executes the browser's rendition of the web page, the browser type, and a timestamp. Upon receiving the message, the server can store and aggregate this information to make advertising targeting decisions. and associate the user's identity with the stored information